ping Elysia, the VC++ expert :)

This is a discussion on ping Elysia, the VC++ expert :) within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; Would you happen to have a link to a good tutorial on how to use VC++ 2008 Express to debug ...

Also, Shift+F11 is step out (running to the end of a function).
All the commands are available through the Debug menu.
Pay attention to the variables window, as well. You can select Auto or Watch, to manually select which variables to watch.
You can also hover the mouse over variables to see their contents.

There are lots of things a debugger can do, but these are the basics. If you need help tracking down a problem, we can explain additional techniques you can use.

I did a little research on the net, and have found that the symbols that is required by the debugger does not come packaged with Visual Studio.

So you have to set the debugger to download the symbols from the M$ symbol server, and there are 2 ways to do this, automatically, or manually. These instructions are directly from the VC++ online help.

Automatically

1.On the Debug menu, click Options.

2.In the Options dialog box, open the Debugging node, and then click Symbols. For more information, see How to: Specify a Symbol Path.

Manually
Right-click in the Modules window and choose Find Symbols on the shortcut menu.

The debugger searches the symbol path to try to find symbols itself. If symbols were not found, the Find Symbols dialog box appears. In the Find Symbols dialog box, locate the symbols file (PDB or DBG file) you want to load. When the name of the symbols file appears in the File Name box, click OK.

The debugger will download whatever symbols are needed for whatever dll is required(ie. kernel32.dll). Don't know what, if any use it is to me, but at least the debugger is getting what it needs, and I don't see this anymore

kernel32.dll!7c817067()
[Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no symbols loaded for kernel32.dll]

And for the pointers that I've declared, in the "Autos" window, I get:
But I think it's because they haven't been initialised yet?

Yes, as you can see, the debugger will automatically try to dereference any pointers it encounters and display its value. In this case, the pointers aren't initialized (in Debug mode, all variables are automatically initialized to 0xCC...). You can click on the plus to see what it's pointing to, if it's a valid pointer. If the pointer you dereference points to a struct that contains more pointers of if it's a pointer to pointer, you can dereference the other pointers and see where they lead, etc, into eternity.

Variables that have been destroyed and pointers that have been freed are filled with 0xFEFEFEFE.

In the "Autos" window, the only variable shown is count, and it's value. Why isn't array[count](and it's value) shown as well? If I was to run the mouse over array[count], I can see it's value, but I would like to see it's value as the program is running. Other programs that I've debugged show ALL values of arrays, and pointers, as they are assigned, so why isn't that happening in this case?

"Auto" isn't always automatic. Use manual watching instead.
Highlight the variable, right-click and select Add Watch. Then turn to your Watch window beside the Auto window. Here you can see all the variables you have specified to watch.

Oh and global variables are bad. That might be one of the reasons that debugger is ignoring it

Visual Studio is a complete developer package. It contains compiler, debugger, editor, code analysis, testing, source server, and much more, depending on version.
There is a reason companies use it over any other IDE.
But for non-professional developers, most of those extra features are overkill. Although, that is not to say testing and code analysis are bad things.

source server o.o? Any explaination to that? Like, do you get a server where you can save your source, and others in the team(if you have one) can just download and upload to it o.o?
If that's it, then it's the ultimate team working benefit, or something! And I've been looking for such a thing for quite sometime xP but I guess it's not in the express version?